Typically, customers or consumers receive a large number of bills relating to services and/or goods received or purchased during a particular billing cycle. Such bills are typically mailed or otherwise provided in hard-copy form to the customer or consumer. The customer or consumer then reviews the bills and sends a check or suitable payment to the originator of the bill. As customers or consumers receive larger and larger amounts of bills, the receipt, review, and payment process is needlessly complicated.
Certain types of customers or consumers are corporations or businesses. Corporations typically receive a very large number of bills during any one billing cycle. If the corporation or business has a large number of facilities, it will typically receive bills, such as utility bills, for each of its facilities. Needless to say, receiving, reviewing, tracking, and paying each bill is, and continues to be a laborious, time intensive undertaking. Moreover, if a bill is disputed, the corporation or business must take the time to contact the originator of the bill and take time to go through the originator's remedial process for rectifying the bill.
Against this backdrop, methods and systems of consolidating bills have developed. Largely, such systems are directed to individual consumers. A typical system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,655,089 to Bucci. Bucci's system is an individual-based system which receives billing information for a consumer and sends, through the mail, a hard-copy statement to the consumer for payment. The consumer receives the statement and returns payment in a single envelope. Bucci's system, while representing a modest improvement over the above-described mass mailing system, fails to fully solve time-, effort-, and resource-associated problems with the above-described mass mailing system.
Accordingly, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing improved billing and payment systems. In particular, this invention arose out of concerns associated with providing improved billing and payment systems which can utilized in connection with utility providers.